Weekend Bookworm: My Promised Land

28 February 2014 , 10:52 AM by Rob Minshull

My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel by Ari Shavit

"My Promised Land is a passionate elegy to Israel and a pained, truthful and full acknowledgement of the brutal dispossession of the Palestinians. To be both is its outstanding achievement. It inspired me, depressed me, moved me, infuriated me, appalled me and instructed me. Page after page, it made me think and think again."

Those words by the Australian philosopher Raimond Gaita adorn the front cover of My Promised Land and deservedly so because it is nigh on impossible to describe how powerful, how mesmerising and how truly beautiful this book is.

Deftly travelling through the history of Zionism, Shavit recounts and analyses the stories of his own family and those of a diverse range of Israelis, both past and present, using their histories to explore and illuminate the achievements and contradictions which underpin the State of Israel. It is both an incredibly inspiring and an exceptionally painful journey.

Of course, the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is said to pose questions of such complexity that it defies both conventional analysis and resolution. In fact, as one academic put it recently, such formulations obfuscate rather than illuminate. And, if that is true, then books like My Promised Landare a bright shining light in a part of the world which is growing darker by the day.

The reality, as Shavit's book demonstrates, is that the Israel-Palestine conflict is relatively uncomplicated and its origins are straightforward. For Shavit, the injustices and brutality which have been inflicted on Palestinians are obvious. An indigenous population was usurped by settlers. The inhabitants of the land were displaced. Right or wrong, justified or not: this is the reality.

Respected Israeli historians like Benny Morris have long argued for the acceptance of this fact; the Leon Uris 'Exodus view of history' has been replaced by a scholarly consensus that sees the foundation of Israel in 1948 as not only marking the salvation of the Jewish people, but also as an event achieved through the expulsion of a large section of the existing Arab population.

In an incredibly emotional and moving book, one of the most poignant chapters is entitled "Lydda 1948". Lydda is now the Israeli city of Lod, close to where Tel Aviv's international airport stands. In 1948, it was occupied mainly by Palestinian Arabs who were forcibly expelled during the fighting which established the new state.

"Lydda," writes Ari Shavit "is our black box. In it lies the dark secret of Zionism." Of course, there never was any secret; there was merely a story which was suppressed. Everyone who was there in the past - and those there now - knows it.

The real question is what it means for the conflict today. "Because of those dead villages it was clear that the Palestinians would always try to flatten us,' writes Shavit. And the choice is stark: "Either reject Zionism because of Lydda, or accept Zionism along with Lydda."

The range of disagreement in Israel about what to do is, in fact, quite narrow. Israelis agree that 1948 was a war of survival and understand that this perspective carries little weight for those Palestinians who lost their homes. How to recognise and rectify this deep and searing wound is where the divergence begins. "Opening the windows of Israeli consciousness to the Palestinian narrative" is only the beginning.

Shavit is sure of one thing however: the continued occupation of the West Bank will do nothing to assist in reconciliation or ease the pain of the on-going conflict. As Shavit puts it, either Israel ends the occupation and removes the settlements or the occupation and the settlers will bring an end to the State of Israel.

Israel continues to face an extraordinary degree of animosity; among Palestinians, left-wingers, the Jewish ultra-Orthodox and, most importantly, among many Muslims. As Shavit writes: "The occupation of Jerusalem and the West Bank amplified this animosity, but it is Israel's existence as a sovereign non-Islamic entity in a land sacred to Islam that creates the inherent tension between the tiny Jewish nation and the vast Islamic world." So what of Israel's future?

"Will the Jewish state dismantle the Jewish settlements, or will the Jewish settlements dismantle the Jewish state? There are only four paths from this junction: Israel as a criminal state that carries out ethnic cleansing in the occupied territories; Israel as an apartheid state; Israel as a binational state; or Israel as a Jewish-democratic state, retreating with much anguish to a border dividing the land."

Critics of this book are right to argue with Shavit's traditional Zionist negation of Jewish life in the Diaspora and point out that Shavit's heroes are mainly Ashkenazi (European Jews) with a preference given to those whose politics tilt to the Left. But the chapter on the immigration of Jews from Arab countries is devastatingly brutal. Israel was European in its inception and direction. Those Jews with a background in Arab countries "were imported only because European Jewry was exterminated."

The popular Israeli talk show host Gal Gabai puts it like this: "Western Zionism feared us. It feared the Arabism we brought with us: the Arab music, the smells and tastes of Arab cuisine, Arab mannerisms. Think about it, something amazing happened here. After the Holocaust, Zionism imported a million Jewish Arabs here so they'd save it, demographically, from the Arab world."

That story of the "cultural castration" of so many Israeli immigrants is today a touch more submerged in the dynamism of a society and economy which is thriving. This is not to say that Shavit does not adequately address other divisions and schisms in Israeli society - the religious and the non-religious, Right versus Left, the identity of the Arabs in Israel - but how the modern Hebrew nation continues to bloom - and transform itself - is a fascinating story that Shavit tells with aplomb. It is, above all argues Shavit, a tale of a nation overshadowed by existential questions: succeed or fail, flourish or perish?

My Promised Land is beautifully written, utterly compelling and heartbreakingly honest. It is the moving and tragic story of the Jewish people in the last century; it is a twin tale of devastation for the Palestinians and dreams of redemption for the Israelis; and it is both inspirational and exasperating.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak writes of My Promised Land: "While Shavit is being brutally honest regarding the Zionist enterprise, he is also insightful, sensitive, and attentive to the dramatic life-stories of his fascinating heroes and heroines. The result is a unique non-fiction book that has the qualities of fine literature."

If you read only one book about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, make sure it is this one.